Looking to optimize your Magento site for search? It's easier than you think and well worth the effort. With a few simple adjustments, your site could be a favorite of search engines and web searchers.

What I find really interesting though is that some niches act as if they are immune to the constant pressures of the modern day marketer. In my experience, one of the biggest offenders is the music industry - specifically independent artists. I've been working in SEO and inbound marketing for about four years now and since I've always had a passion for music, I wanted to take some time to discuss some simple, highly actionable steps that musicians can take to start marketing their band like a boss.

It's times like these that you truly need something to kick-start your day and keep it from becoming another one of those lost weekdays where you get home and wonder what you accomplished. (Hint: probably nothing.) Here is a list of a few easy things to look at SEO-wise that might just ignite a little passion, creativity, or drive to your day:

Earlier this year a number of our sites tanked and when I say tanked I mean THEY TANKED. Not only did visits dry up, as a result of their rankings evaporating, but all toolbar PageRank disappeared reverting to n/a. I'm talking a site with a homepage toolbar PR 7 showing PR n/a! It was a very strange experience, made all the more strange by the fact that sites that ranked on pure age (been there since god was a boy with decent content) tanked alongside sites we'd worked on.

This post is about building a listening machine for the web. We’re fans of the cheap (or free) DIY approach. If you have hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, tools like Radian6 are great. For the rest of us, we can create a pretty powerful listening tool with the following....

Music is one of the most popular forms of entertainment and one of the most traded digital assets on the planet. Ever since Napster's debut in 1999 musicians, record labels and the RIAA have all singled out file sharing as the overwhelming source for loss of revenue in record sales. I have always wondered why they get to point all of these crazy fingers without highlighting how absolutely awful they are at marketing their products on the Internet – not to mention how little they seem to care about the revenue they lose to their own horribleness.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Steve just wrote this post so he could watch old Super Bowl commercials." And you're not wrong ;-) I'll jump at any chance to watch (and share) YouTube videos. Fortunately, in the process of sifting through my favorite ads from years past, I was able to select a few videos that can actually teach us valuable SEO lessons. So sit back, and enjoy these all-time great Super Bowl commercials, while I drop a few SEO nuggets of knowledge along the way.

I had a website with some placeholder stuff for some time and recently I updated it with proper content. The spider bots had crawled and indexed the earlier content before, and not only that also ascertained a certain crawl frequency for that domain which was obviously quite low.